teh photos we failed to take

[lapietra]

Gazing out the window of the overpriced Monterey Bay Fisherman's Wharf restaurant, the evening after visiting the Aquarium (exhausting my camera's small card capacity with no computer to dump the pics on in sight) while eating mediocre obviously pre-packaged gnocchi and ravioli dinners we could have made ourselves in the microwave at the Quality Inn for a fraction of the cost (and yet wasn't it worth it to reward one of the desperate general managers trying to lure us in with things like small cups of delicious creamy clam chower with our small portion of hard-earned cash we'd set aside for the occasion, just that once?) we were unable to take a picture of this scene: a glowing full moon, sending thick broken silver shards over the water moving gently beside a small wooden dock holding three lolling cocoa-brown, cream and grey sea otters alternately dozing, waking, and barking their despair at the unattainable, delicious scent of sustainable seafood being prepared at the various other overpriced Monterey Bay Fisherman's Wharf restaurants; a just-white late-adolescent seagull standing on one leg on a post to the front and left of this, and just beyond and almost opposite, a middle-aged couple huddled and hugging for warmth, possibly saying the same thing as we were to each other - 'This is sort of romantic, isn't it, even if it's a little bourgeois...'